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The simple rite unfolded on a lazy summer afternoon, light on pomp but weighted with possibility for the Diocese of Scranton.

Parishioners filled almost every pew last month at Our Lady of the Eucharist Parish in Pittston to witness history in the making as the Most Rev. Joseph C. Bambera, D.D., bishop of Scranton, installed Sister Mary Ann Cody, I.H.M., as parish life coordinator to shepherd the faith community in the absence of a resident priest.

The Rev. Jeffrey Walsh, based at St. Peter’s Cathedral Rectory in Scranton, will serve as the sacramental minister, but Sister Cody will provide Our Lady of the Eucharist’s day-to-day pastoral and organizational leadership in a role the bishop described as “faithful witness, wise teacher and servant leader.”

Sister Cody, a longtime Catholic educator who previously acted as the parish’s pastoral associate, is the first parish life coordinator within the diocese.

She won’t be the last.

After a long period of tumult and upheaval during which it shuttered churches and schools, consolidated parishes, wrestled with finances and dealt with fallout from the clergy sexual abuse scandal, the Diocese of Scranton confronts a new challenge.

A diminishing number of active priests to minister to the spiritual needs of the nearly 280,000 Roman Catholics in Northeast Pennsylvania in the coming years will require the diocese to embrace other forms of pastoral leadership.

As the diocese takes this next step in its evolution, with deacons, other religious or laypeople filling non-sacramental roles previously filled almost solely by priests, there will be implications for how the local church engages the laity and how parishioners approach and live out their faith.

“The challenge will always be that we keep in perspective how this particular model is meant to unfold,” Bishop Bambera said in an interview. “It’s not a goal. It’s a response to a need, and it needs to be seen in tandem always with that invitation given to all of our people to serve in our parishes.”

Maria Poggi Johnson, Ph.D., director of graduate studies in theology at the University of Scranton, said while the diocese is taking aim at an immediate crisis — the looming priest shortage — the changes are in another sense long overdue.

As new leadership forms develop, the laity in particular will be expected to step up and answer the universal call to holiness that the Second Vatican Council emphasized five decades ago, said Dr. Johnson, who is familiar with the initiatives through her tangential work with the diocesan Office for Parish Life.

What Catholics will see, she said, is fellow parishioners taking more obvious roles within their churches. It will be “a sign to everybody that we’re all in this together.”

“It is on one hand a necessary response to a difficult situation, to a pinch. But people in the diocese are thinking of it as a real opportunity to do things we should have been doing all along. So it’s a pinch that offers a positive path,” Dr. Johnson said.

“If tomorrow the seminaries were full and there was a huge upsurge in vocations ... this would still be a good thing to do. We wouldn’t drop it. This is worth doing in its own right.”

At the same time, the number of parishes without a priest in residence has grown from five in 2005 to 14 in 2015 even as mergers have trimmed the overall number of parishes from 189 to 120, diocesan figures show.

In another 10 years, perhaps sooner, the diocese anticipates retirements, illness and other circumstances will thin the pastoral ranks by about 40 active priests, leaving fewer than 100.

The crunch is not unique to Northeast Pennsylvania.

Nationwide, there are now almost 2,000 fewer diocesan priests than a decade ago. About one of five parishes across the United States now lacks a resident priest pastor, according to statistics compiled by the Georgetown University-affiliated Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.

The Diocese of Scranton has 10 seminarians in various stages of priestly formation, including two men ordained as transitional deacons in May who are in line to join the priesthood next year.

Although it is double the number of men who were in the seminary when he assumed leadership of the diocese five years ago, Bishop Bambera acknowledged the church is swimming against a powerful tide. That is despite what he described as “a recommitment to vocational culture” in parishes and throughout the diocese.

“We have had great initiatives that show a refocusing of attention and energy around vocations ... but that is never in the short run going to balance out the loss of 40 men,” he said.

Dr. Johnson said there are clearly other approaches the diocese could take to deal with diminishing vocations, including a further consolidation of the remaining parishes into a handful of mega-churches.

“The bishop has said we’re done with that,” she said. “We’re done with consolidations, and now we are going to looking into other ways of providing leadership.”

Priest shortage

In 2009, when Bishop Bambera’s predecessor, the Most Rev. Joseph F. Martino, announced the dramatic restructuring that would result in the closure of nearly half of the diocese’s churches and sharply reduce the number of parishes, he cited Northeast Pennsylvania’s changing economics and demographics.

Many of those same forces have contributed to the diminishing number of priests, just as they helped drive the cascade of diocesan school closings in the last decade, Bishop Bambera said.

About two-thirds of the Catholics in the diocese live in its two most populous counties, Lackawanna and Luzerne.

Bishop Bambera pointed out those two counties also have populations that are significantly older than the state and national averages.

In addition, from a cultural standpoint, while many young people today may have a sense of spirituality, their understanding and practice of it are not the same as those of past generations, including their Baby Boomer parents, he said.

“I ask the question: Where do priests come from? They don’t fall from the sky. They come from families, and if families are aging as our demographic is, if families culturally are getting a little bit smaller, if cultural values and norms are shifting, what is that going to do?” Bishop Bambera asked.

“It’s going to affect the number of men coming from parish families and their decision whether or not they are going into the seminary. There is a huge logic here that I would suggest sometimes is not really appreciated and is overlooked when we see the church making decisions to consolidate a school, a parish, or to move into an alternative type of leadership like we are doing here.”

Catholic decline

However, those decisions have also taken a toll.

While he believes demographics and culture are at the root of the biggest challenges facing the diocese, Bishop Bambera readily concedes some people have left the church because they were angered or disaffected by the shutdown or merger of a parish or a school.

The total Catholic population within the 11 counties of the diocese was 323,047 in 2010, according figures supplied by the diocese. The number now stands at 278,964, a drop of almost 45,000, or 14 percent, in five years.

While the numbers are stark, they also come with a caveat.

Diocesan spokesman William Genello said in email the population statistics are based on parish registrations. Because parishes use different methods to count parishioners, the figures are only estimates based on information available.

Bishop Bambera said many of the parishes that closed during the restructuring had “significantly diminished” numbers of parishioners, and it had reached the point where the diocese was funneling more resources into the maintenance of buildings than it was directing toward ministries and programs.

Still, it was difficult for many Catholics to lose “something so intimately connected to people from a faith perspective” as the parish that perhaps their parents or their grandparents helped to build, he said.

“That was painful. It was painful for our people. It was painful for our clergy who had to lead them through that difficult time. It was painful for my predecessor and for me,” Bishop Bambera said. “But by and large, most of our people settled.”

So have the diocese’s finances.

After a string of six- and seven-figure annual operating deficits — $640,000 in 2008, $3.1 million in 2009, $740,000 in 2010 — the diocese has enjoyed healthy, usually multimillion-dollar surpluses each of the last four years. It finished fiscal 2014 with an operating surplus of nearly $3.3 million.

Although financial stability will never be the sole measure of viability within the church, Bishop Bambera said, it is an indication the diocese and its parishes are strong.

“My sense is if you talk to most of the people in the parishes right now, they would tell you that while maybe some of them would still long for that parish that closed — I’m not dismissing that — the parishes that exist right now by and large are much more vibrant and mission-focused than they were before we adjusted them,” he said.

“Erosion of faith”

As director of vocations and seminarians since 2013, the Rev. Donald J. Williams leads diocesan efforts to identify potential candidates to serve as priests and to assist them during the discernment process.

When he listens to people talk about the vocation crisis, there is one line he hears most often: “If the pope would lighten up on celibacy, we would have more priests.”

Sure, it’s a factor, he said, but it’s not the only one and not the biggest one.

Some of them are obvious, like the demographic shifts cited by Bishop Bambera, Father Williams said. Others are less apparent, like the presence of fewer religious sisters in Catholic schools, where nuns were always among the greatest promoters of the vocations.

Then there are a host of cultural challenges — individualism, secularism, materialism — that have led to what Father Williams called the “erosion of faith in the family” and left many teens and young adults with a kind of spiritual bankruptcy.

“If the family is not practicing their faith, if people aren’t going to church, if people don’t continue their education and spiritual formation beyond confirmation, where are we going?” he asked. “If there is nobody in the pews, how do you call them to this?”

Father Williams is in his second stint as vocations director, having previously served from 1997 to 2002.

The major difference from then to now — and which is affecting not just vocations but faith development in general — is the uptick in “busy-ness,” he said. Young people especially do not allow themselves to slow down, relax and “really enter the silence.”

“The pace is so frenetic, and young people are trying to do it all,” he said. “The pace of life is much quicker, and the fear of commitment is a little bit higher. Young people today don’t want to commit until they know all their options.”

From Father Williams’ perspective, the priest sexual abuse scandals that have roiled through the church in recent decades and still grab headlines whenever they surface have not been a factor in diminishing vocations, at least not directly.

Their parents or older congregants may look askance when an individual expresses an interest in the priesthood, but Father Williams said he has found the scandal is simply not an issue for most young people today.

Where it perhaps has had more of an impact, he said, is within the ranks of priests and other religious themselves.

In the wake of the scandal, priests and deacons probably have become more reticent — “a little gun-shy” — about affirming potential candidates for the priesthood or inviting the possibility of a vocation, Father Williams said.

“Maybe with the presbyteriate, it’s kind of taken the wind our of our sails if you know what I’m saying. It’s kind of kept people from maybe being as proactive as we can be or as engaging or whatever,” he said.

“Things you never thought twice about before you do now. I mean, I come from a family of huggers, and you can’t do that. You have to be careful. Everybody does.”

New leadership

Most Catholics in the Diocese in Scranton were not surprised when, in a videotaped homily presented April 12 at Sunday Masses throughout the diocese, Bishop Bambera confirmed the diminishing numbers of priests in active ministry and outlined how the church intends to respond.

In delivering the homily, and in following it in the weeks after with eight regional “dialogue sessions” with pastors and parish delegations, Bishop Bambera said he would like to believe the diocese has been as open and transparent as possible about the challenge posed by fewer priests and the options available to address it.

“That’s why it was so important for me to be proactive in this discussion, not to one day wake up and realize I don’t have enough priests to staff my parishes and just lob something in a parish’s lap,” he said.

A new type of leadership for a parish — whether it takes the form of a parish life coordinator, a team ministry or the linkage of two or more parishes — is not in and of itself the objective, he said.

“My goal is provide what the church says I need to provide: a pastor in every parish with the people of God — deacons, religious and lay faithful — doing their part to build up that community,” Bishop Bambera said.

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